The Undead: If Vampires Didn’t Bite

Way back when, I wrote about my preferred type of zombie: the animated-corpse version of the Terminator. Oddly enough, the topic has come up no less than three times in the last couple days, so I thought it would be worth reiterating on my blog (what can I say, I have weird conversations). Disease- and zombie-bite/infection-based zombies are lame. Why? Because that territory is already covered by vampires and by werewolves.

I started to ask myself why it was lame, and I wondered if perhaps the infectious bite itself was the problem, and so I decided to take a look at vampires and werewolves and see if there wasn’t a problem with them spreading their conditions by bite, too. I thought “what if vampirism wasn’t spread by blood-sucking?” Some media have already addressed the problem of every victim of a vampire being made into a vampire. It sucks.

To become a vampire, you used to have to be a really awful person during your life. Someone bad enough that people would execute you several times to make sure you stayed dead. And then mutilate your corpse. You had to be so bad that they would dig up your body periodically to make sure you hadn’t gotten up and wandered away to wreak vengeance on your killers. And sometimes, that wasn’t enough to stop you.

Werewolves were made through a creation of cannibalism and weird rites of passage. Adults generally didn’t turn into werewolves unless they were explicitly cursed by the gods. Mostly, it was violent, teenage boys who’d run around in the woods murdering people and eating them, and howling at the moon. “Lost boys” shenanigans. None of this “if you get bitten by them” garbage. You had to be initiated. It was a whole process.